Mara Lantern: Broken Realms Part 10

"Let's let Mara be on her way," Ping said, standing up. "Come talk to us if you change your mind."

CHAPTER 16.

SUTER RAN HIS gloved finger down the clipboard and said, "Number sixty-seven. Let's take a look. There are labels at the end of each table. Just lift up the sheet a little, and you'll see it." Vapor puffed in front of the white cloth mask covering his mouth.

Indicating that Bohannon should follow, he walked down the aisle and stopped occasionally to lift up a sheet. The third time, he stopped and turned to Bohannon. "Go to the head of the table and lift up the sheet, and tell me what you see."

Bohannon froze.

"You've seen a dead body before, haven't you?"

"Of course, but why do I need to see this one?"

"Just do it. It will help you understand what we're dealing with."

Bohannon stepped between two of the tables and turned to the cadaver Suter indicated. Bohannon leaned over the table, pinched the upper left corner of the sheet and lifted it to reveal the dead pa.s.senger. He stared into the face of Debbie Bartkowski, the apartment climber and jumper. She was slimmer but recognizable.

"Jesus wept." Bohannon jerked his hand back, used it to rub his jaw so hard it distorted his features. His other hand started to shake.

"Are you starting to understand?" Suter asked. He had a smirk on his face that Bohannon wanted to punch.

"h.e.l.l, no, I'm not starting to understand. What the h.e.l.l is going on?"

"One hundred and twenty bodies were recovered from the fuselage of the plane when it was pulled from the river two days ago. There were 121 pa.s.sengers and crew on the flight, and all of them were accounted for on the day of the crash. All of them supposedly survived."

"Supposedly?"

"Well, we have a bunch of bodies here, and we have a bunch of people alive and well who say they were on the flight. The question is, are the people who survived-the people who were fished out of the Columbia-actually the same people who left Portland on that flight?"

"There simply can't be two sets of the same people. That makes no sense. What are you saying? They're clones, zombies, what?" Bohannon stabbed his finger in the air above the body. "Debbie Bartkowski cannot be dead here and alive over in Gresham at the same time. These people either died in that plane crash or they didn't."

"All evidence to the contrary," Suter began, "we have not gotten a single call from a family member asking where their loved one is. Believe me, if someone were missing, we'd have heard about it by now. I've worked several crashes, and families don't let you off the hook. Every pa.s.senger came out of the river into the loving arms of his or her relatives, and"-he paused for effect-"we also have a body in here for each person on the flight, except for one."

Bohannon dropped the sheet over Debbie Bartkowski's face. "That simply cannot be. How can you accept that?" He felt his blood pressure building, his eyes bugging.

"We don't get to pick our facts. We just have to deal with them. We need to keep interviewing and letting the evidence lead us to the answers. We have to find out what caused that plane to come down. And to do that, you're going to have to be a little more dispa.s.sionate about things, even if they don't make sense."

"Dispa.s.sionate. Okay." He took a deep breath and looked up to the ceiling. "Mrs. Bartkowski here certainly looks like the one we talked to yesterday. That better?" His voice trembled, his hand continued to shake.

Suter smirked again. "So does Mrs. Gonzales, and, I bet, if we look at Mr. Newsome, he'll match up. They're on the list here."

He walked farther down the row of tables and stopped to look at a number. He waved for Bohannon to follow. After a moment of hesitation, Bohannon relented. He lifted the sheet on Mrs. Gonzales-same face as the mind reader in southeast Portland. Suter pointed to a table two rows down.

"That one should be Newsome, the egg man. Go ahead and take a look."

"I'm about to lose it," Bohannon said, looking down at the man's face. "This ain't right."

"Remember, dispa.s.sionate. Just let the facts lead you."

"I don't want to go where these facts lead."

Bohannon leaned against one of the tent's support poles, looking out over the tables of cadavers.

He stood there for several minutes, not moving, until a chill went down his neck, through his spine and to the rest of his body. He got the jitters and realized the shakes came as much from the morgue's refrigeration as the secrets it held.

"What's going to happen to these people?"

"I don't know. We may never know, depending on how things turn out." Suter looked unconcerned.

Bohannon shook his head, disgusted. "Can we get out of here?"

While they took off their BioSuits, Bohannon said, "You said there were 121 pa.s.sengers but only 120 bodies. Why the discrepancy? Who's missing?"

"Since we've known about the redundancy among survivors and fatalities, I haven't had a chance to figure it out. We a.s.sumed someone was blown out of the plane or swept down the river, which would not be unusual in cases like this," Suter said. "I'll give you the lists, and you can do the compare. You tell me what you find in the morning."

CHAPTER 17.

NO MATTER HOW hard she stomped, the mud would not come off her shoes, so Mara slipped them off and left them on the back porch. Heavy rain always turned the short path from the driveway to the back door into a muddy mess, and she had just sprinted through it. She took off her jacket, shook it and opened the door into the kitchen. The smell of spaghetti sauce and garlic bread drove away the s.h.i.+ver she felt coming on.

"Hard day at the salt mines?" her mother asked, standing over the stove, stirring a steaming pot.

"Not at all. It was nice to get back into a routine and do something productive." Mara slipped her jacket onto a hook next to the door.

"Ned Pastor called and said he would stop by later this evening to talk to you about the medallion. Why don't you go get some dry clothes on and wash up? Dinner will be ready in about ten minutes."

"Don't overcook the pasta," Mara said heading out of the kitchen.

"A thank-you would be nice. This isn't a boarding house, you know."

Ned showed up at 7:15 p.m. carrying the DVD case Mara had used for the medallion as he stepped into the living room. He sat down in an armchair across from the couch where Mara and Diana sat.

"I've cleaned it up," he said. He removed the copper disk from the case. "All of the char and soot came off. However, I cannot get the burned azurite crystals to come out of their settings. I've tried everything, including prying them loose, heating the metal to soften and loosen it, even smas.h.i.+ng or splitting the crystals." He held up the medallion, pointing to the blackened stones in the newly gleaming copper face. "It doesn't make sense."

"What do you mean?" Mara asked.

"Even if I couldn't get the settings to loosen up, azurite isn't that hard. It should be relatively easy to remove. I took some extreme measures to take them out. They would not budge. If I didn't know better, I would think those crystals are something other than azurite."

"Could they be something different? Something harder?"

"No, it's azurite. Except for the larger crystal at the bottom. That's black tourmaline. I a.s.sumed it was a burned azurite crystal like the others, but it's not. Anyway, it's not letting me take out the azurite."

"Not letting you?" she said.

"I told you that I felt strange about working on it. I know it sounds funny, but I just get the feeling that something other than the physical properties of this medallion prevents me from removing those stones. I have no other explanation."

"Do you get impressions like this about other things you work on?"

"Sure. I sense energies, both good and bad, in many objects I work on. This one is different. The impressions I get from it are not subtle. They are profound."

"Okay, I guess I'll look at other options. Thanks for everything."

Ned tipped the carrier into his hand to pour out cut azurite crystals and showed them to Mara. "If you can find someone who can do the work, here are the replacement crystals I cut." He put the crystals and medallion back in the case and handed it to Mara. "Sorry I couldn't be more help."

Mara stretched out on the couch in the living room, reading a magazine while her mother sat in her lotus position on the round rug in front of the fireplace, meditating with a candle and several crystals placed in an arc in front of her.

"Why did you and Dad get divorced?" Mara asked.

Her mother opened one eye and looked across the room at her daughter. "What prompted that? You've never asked before."

"An article I'm reading, and it occurred to me that I didn't know."

"As trite as it sounds, we just drifted apart," Diana said, keeping her eyes closed. "I became more engaged in my spiritual beliefs, and he finished his residency, started to get deeper into his career. He felt more pragmatic about life. I stayed more of a, well, a free spirit, I suppose."

"You're always saying I'm like him, but he says I'm like you. He's not that thrilled about me working at Mr. Mason's shop and thinks I should just go straight into college."

"I suppose you've got a bit of both of us in you," her mother said, reaching for a demantoid, a l.u.s.trous green garnet. She raised the round crystal to the candle flame, gave her wrist a twist. A kaleidoscope of green hues spun throughout the room. "You have many facets. You control which ones s.h.i.+ne."

"That is so cool. You should do light shows at the planetarium."

Diana smiled and slid back into her meditation.

"So you just woke up one day and asked for a divorce?"

"What?"

"You and Dad. You asked him, right?"

"You are a buzz kill, child. I don't remember. It was mutual."

"Did you guys ever consider having other kids?"

Diana opened her eyes. She stared at Mara long enough without answering to make Mara uncomfortable. "We did," Diana said.

"You considered having more kids?"

"When you were almost two, I got pregnant. I went nearly full term, but when he was born, his lungs were underdeveloped, and he didn't make it."

"Oh, my G.o.d. I'm sorry, Mom."

"It was a long time ago, sweetie. It was a complication we didn't expect. After all, we had you, and everything went perfectly. I don't think your dad and I ever really recovered from that. He dived into his career, and I looked for solace in my own way. We eventually went our separate ways."

"Why didn't you ever tell me?"

"You were too young to remember, and I suppose it just never came up when you got older."

"Did you name the baby?"

"We named him Sam."

CHAPTER 18.

BOHANNON PULLED INTO the circular drive in front of the beige stuccoed airport hotel and braked at the front entrance under a large overhang.

Suter walked out the hotel's front door and grabbed the pa.s.senger door handle. "Head over to the hospital," he said, slipping into the pa.s.senger seat. "I left the NTSB contact info with the doctors, and Pirelli forwarded a call this morning from Peter Newsome's wife. You remember Newsome, right?"

"How could I forget?"

"Turns out his wife was on the flight, too, and she says they want to talk."

"I don't recall seeing another Newsome on the list."

"Kept her maiden name. She's Jill O'Donnell. They were sitting toward the back of the plane and apparently saw a tussle of some kind."

Bohannon pulled out of the hotel driveway and headed west toward the hospital.

"Does the wife seem to think anything is odd about her husband?"

"Didn't say anything. Why?"

"If you were married to someone who laid an egg, wouldn't you think that was strange?"

"I suppose, but, you have to remember, she's probably a clone too. Who knows what these people think is strange? Anyway, it probably wasn't an actual egg. I'm sure it didn't have, you know, a little something inside waiting to hatch."

"Lord, have mercy."